Inside Deep Throat

Another week, another warmly sentimental trip back to the picturesque 1970s. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's documentary is a lively but weirdly uncritical and incurious recreation of the life and times of the world's first mainstream porn film. Its director, Gerard Damiato, was a swinger and former hairdresser who dabbled in stag films; all our lives changed when he discovered lonely and vulnerable wannabe porn star Linda Lovelace (née Boreman), who had an ability to suck furlong-lengths of erect penis.

Damiato devised a smut-slapstick storyline especially for her about a woman with her clitoris in her gullet and, with a cheesy kind of genius, hit on the brilliant phrase Deep Throat, a quasi-horror title facetiously evoking fear, shame and excitement in equal measure. A heady mood of liberal subversion was in the air - Woodward and Bernstein gave the smash-hit movie's title to their secret source, FBI deputy director Mark Felt, and the film popularised fellatio so effectively as consequence-free recreational sex that a later president was to reveal that it did not count as "sexual relations" at all.

This film neatly skewers the pomposity and hypocrisy of Deep Throat's government censors. But Erica Jong is the only pundit to offer any pertinent analysis: to the effect that the whole idea of a throat-clitoris is a male fantasy-justification for male pleasure. The feminist backlash, led by Linda Lovelace herself, is conscientiously noted, only to be cancelled in the film by claiming that these feminists were the "worst censors of all", and Bailey and Barbato seem unaware of feminist arguments that the porn patriarchs and the religious right had a lot in common. The mob's financial interest in the film is nervously placed on the record, but with no investigative zeal for tracking down the wiseguys themselves. There is talk of a Deep Throat re-release: have the mafiosi sportingly relinquished their stake? After this superficial celebration, the directors may now perhaps turn to Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses from 1976, and how it popularised auto-erotic strangling in the west.

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